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private_messaging comments on Human capital or signaling? No, it's about doing the Right Thing and acquiring karma - Less Wrong Discussion
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The general math ability is learned, though. The capacity to learn it varies, yes, and could in principle be signalled, but it's on it's own of no value unless actualized.
I'm not sure what a philosophy degree is supposed to be signalling and to who. What profession it makes you more likely to be hired in, besides philosophy, as compared to a degree relevant for said profession?
I don't know besides philosophy, but certainly signalling makes a significant part of career advancement in philosophy.
Doing real innovation in philosophy, that is, coming up with new interesting philosophical problems or new "solutions" to old philosophical problems, or at least novel insight into them, is really hard, in part because the discipline is very old and therefore the low-hanging fruits have been picked, and in part because there are no clear standards for settling questions. Therefore, signalling of general scholarship and affiliation to particular trends plays a significant role in the profession.
The general scholarship is something one obtains while studying for a philosophy degree, not something someone signals with it...
It seems to me that philosophy forked into two branches. One branch builds foundations carefully and knows a valid argument from an invalid one. Other branch is swayed too much by the desire to have answers right now, gives in to the temptation of deceiving oneself.
So when there's a very complicated problem - nature of consciousness for example - the former branch stays silent like a kid at school who knows how to answer the test problem, working out the inferences towards the answer, while the latter one writes in guesses right now.